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Episode 693: Capcom's Vertical Shooter Legacy

Jeremy: Greetings, patrons. As you may be aware, we at the Retronauts Podcasting Concern take video game history very seriously. And, once again, we're taking steps to share with you the history of one of gaming's most important and enduring entities: Japanese studio Capcom. In the past, we&...

This Month In Retronauts: May 2025 edition

Last month an unprecedented amount of breaking news resulted in our longest community podcast ever. Today, without anything on par with a new console reveal, I present our second-longest community podcast ever. How did this happen? Don't ask me, I just work here.Me, of course, is Diamond Feit an...

Episode 692: Perfect Dark

Hi Patrons, Diamond Feit here. I love having this gig where you spend money and I get to talk about video games that you might remember but in this case, I'm specifically talking about a video game that one of you asked me to remember on purpose. More specifically, Ryan Hoss requested a podcast ...

This Week In Retro: Gradius

May 1985: The Viper is comingby Diamond FeitDespite what some legislators would have you believe, corporations are not people. Corporations cannot create; people create. We scribble, we tinker, we experiment. We err and flub and blunder until we get things right. Corporations can own the rights to o...

Episode 691: Order of Ecclesia [Metroidvania Book Club Pt. 2]

Jeremy: Good evening, friends. This episode constitutes the second of our Metroidvania Book Club ventures: the series where we talk about metroidvanias. Though no books are actually involved. Sorry about that.Once again, our Book Club Crew returns, minus one. Chris Sims was out the weekend we record...

Episode 690: Mario & Luigi

Two Mario RPG brands launched at the dawn of the 21st century, and while Paper Mario had the more immediate gimmick, Mario & Luigi devoted itself to standard RPG mechanics dressed up in Mushroom Kingdom finery. Though the series burned bright in its early years, the back half saw a decline with unde...

This Week(s) in Retro: Jumping Flash! & Commando (1985)

Good news/bad news, folks: I'm all caught up with writing my columns after my recent illness but my voice is still far from 100%. Fortunately I met this guy outside 7-11 who volunteered to supply his voice as a substitute; all it took was writing out every word phonetically and six hours of non-...

Episode 689: Dragonstrike

Nadia: Here be dragons, dragons, and more dragons. It's time to talk about 1990's DragonStrike for the PC, which means it's also time to talk about the strange top-down NES adaptation of TSR's flight sim/combat game! This week, Dragon Highlord Nadia Oxford is joined by two fellow dra...

Episode 688: Muppets Games

The Muppets have been with us in some way for 70 years—yes, really—meaning Jim Henson's fuzzy, slightly demented puppet creations essentially grew up alongside the medium of video games. And while turning the Muppets' pun-based humor into an interactive experience went about as well as e...

Episode 687: Attack & Dethrone God, Book 2:1

Jeremy: So first of all, you need to understand that this episode was recorded nearly two months ago, and it was on the books to publish this week for much, much longer than that. Which is to say that the intro quip—a quote from a song about the chaotic nature of the U.S., recorded 30 years ago by...

This Month In Retronauts: April 2025 edition

I hope you've got no pressing engagements for the next 150 minutes because thanks to Nintendo this is the longest Retronauts community podcast ever! You know we had to talk about the latest Direct and the announcement of Switch 2 while also making time for your comments and answers to last month...

Episode 686: Sigma Star Saga DX

Stuart: I refuse to accept Sigma Star Saga as retro. In fact, I refuse to accept the Game Boy Advance as retro, let alone one of its latter-day titles. But it is, and it is getting a well-deserved, long-awaited re-release, therefore I have deigned to cover it after being given the opportunity by Way...

This Week In Retro: Titan Souls

April 14, 2015: One shot, one killby Diamond FeitIn 1980 SNK invented and named the Boss battle as we know it in the video game world, introducing powerful enemies who periodically appeared to test the player's skill in Sasuke Vs. Commander. Originally called oyabun (親分 or "leader") ...

Episode 685 Extras

Jeremy: As promised, here are the visual accompaniments to our MGC 2025 episode.The PowerPoint here accompanies the first segment of the episode, on Chrono Trigger. The video goes with the Game Tapes segment. Please enjoy!

Episode 685: Chrono Trigger at 30 + The Magic of Japanese Game Tapes

UPDATE NOTE: It turns out that Brian somehow vanished from the audio mix in the final MP3 file conversion—a strange glitch that I've never seen happen before. I've uploaded a new stereo file that restores his contributions. It's twice as large, but it's complete, and that's wha...

Episode 684: SNK vs. Capcom

No, no, no, this isn't a podcast weighing the entire output of two video game publishers against one another, we're talking about the very specific crossover series of fighting* games that SNK and Capcom created featuring their two stables of characters.Obviously Diamond Feit is hosting this...

This Week In Retro: Thexder

April 1985: More than meets the eyeby Diamond FeitIt's funny how certain pop cultural properties proliferate across various mediums but manage to miss out on one that, by all rights, they really should have conquered. 20th Century Fox enjoyed full ownership over the Alien and Predator characters...

Episode 683: Castlevania Order of Ecclesia - The Metroidvania Book Club Pt. 1

Jeremy:Good news, everyone! Now you can play a video game!This episode marks the first of hopefully many entries in the Metroidvania Book Club series. You'll hear a full explanation of the concept in the podcast itself, but it's pretty straightfoward and hardly original. Every three months, ...

This Week In Retro: Axiom Verge

March 31, 2015: Proverb Edge? Maxim Threshold? Adage Brink?by Diamond FeitLove it or hate it, the portmanteau "Metroidvania" is here to stay. Many writers have tried to introduce generic descriptors for action games where players explore a singular "level" for power-ups and items tha...

Episode 682: Bloodborne

What's scarier: being trapped in an endless Lovecraftian nightmare, or the fact that Bloodborneis now old enough to be covered on Retronauts? While you mull that one over, listen in as Bob Mackey, Brendan James(of the Blowbackpodcast) and Libby Watson(check out her Twitch channel) dive into this...

Episode 681: Space Invaders

Kevin: The inexorable march of Space Invadershas finally reached Retronauts! Even 47 years since its debut it’s hard to fathom the grip this game had in coin-operated entertainment in general and especially Japan. Without Tomohiro Nishikado’s classic, would Japan’s game industry and broader cu...

This Month In Retronauts: March 2025 edition

First thing's first: if the formatting below looks weird (oddly sized text perhaps), I'm throwing my hands up because somehow cutting & pasting text from my documents into Patreon has given me all kinds of trouble in recent weeks. I'm not about to write original text in THISCMS, thank yo...

Episode 680: Axiom Verge

Jeremy:I've been out of the press long enough that when we start commemorating the anniversary of games I reviewed, it makes me feel very old and very mortal. Nevertheless, we persevere! Because this month is the 10th anniversary of what the kids these days would call a "banger," and not...

This Week In Retro: God of War (2005)

March 22, 2005: You have selected "Deicide"by Diamond FeitI was never a big reader as a kid but the books I read, I read them cover to cover over and over until I seared an image of every page into my memory. I wish I could say I retained some crucial piece of information from that experienc...

Episode 679: Doom (The 2005 Movie)

Doom took over the gaming landscape in the early '90s, but emerged just as the first wave of video game movies hit theaters. So when the 21st century was upon us, Hollywood decided to strike while the iron was still kind of warm and delivered us a Doom movie starring none other than Dwayne "...

Episode 678: Years-in-Review Revue, 1985 Pt. II

Jeremy:AS YOU KNOW, "Years-in-Review Revues" are always exercises in attempting to corral chaos as a large group of people attempts to cover a wide range of topics with ample room for digression. Sometimes, chaos escapes. And really, I think that's all I have to say about this one... but...

This Week In Retro: Chrono Trigger

March 11, 1995: tick tock on the clock but the party don't stop, noby Diamond FeitMankind will never come up with a greater invention than the concept of time. I love language—it keeps me employed for sure—but I do wish we had stopped making new ones once we had enough words to ask each othe...

Episode 677: Type-In Games

Kevin:If you listen to this podcast, you’re probably well-versed in the many, many formats video games have been and continue to be distributed in: digital downloads, cartridges, CDs, DVDs, Blu-Rays, floppy disks, cassette tapes, even vinyl. But good old-fashioned paper has served as a way to dist...

This Week In Retro: Elevator Action Returns

March 1995: CREATaNEWSOCIETYby Diamond FeitI used to have this rule about sequels that stated they had to debut within a decade of the original work or else I dismissed them out of hand. Why would I make such a rule given that I have no authority on the matter? I suspect it was just one of the many ...

Episode 676: Vagrant Story

Nadia:This week on Retronauts: Show a little respect for faerie tales, Riskbreaker. Yasumi Matsuno's masterpiece action RPG Vagrant Storyis officially a quarter of a century old, so now's as good a time as any for a few old-ass writers to swap stories about the cold, dead corridors of Lea Mo...